Just heard (on the radio, wow!) that Rim has ended its court battle with NTP by settling. (hey - it hasn't even made it onto their web site yet)

But is this a case of too little too late?

I got my first taste of Blackberry years ago - I loved their original (non-cell phone) device and lived on it for a good 2 years. This was before you could get Blackberry devices from your phone company and the like. Their stock was $10. Then it went to $180. Then they introduced phone devices. Then the competition started paying attention. BlackBerry still ruled back then but after the dotCom bubble broke. Down to $20 and now back to $81.

I stopped using my Blackberry because of poor customer service (I wasn't about to pay the equivalent price of a new device when I was simply "renting" mine for a repair). I only NOW have gotten to the point where I get the same results from my PDA (I use an ipaq but really rely on Google). Are my costs that much cheaper? Likely not. But there are so many more alternatives and hey, if I can do all of my computing on one device, then that would be ideal.

But I'm glad they are saved. I like RIM - great product but now they just look like another one in the great PDA community. Where's the innovation? I want them to make me go nuts just like they did with the original Blackberry.